Release Notes

Current release branch: ueVite26-JulyMajor-release. Staging work lands in ueVite26-JulyStaging before promotion. Feature branches such as ueVite26-HairWorks and ueVite26-JulyRtSettings are merged when stable.

This page tracks what is in the current major release, what is actively in progress, and what is planned. Feature lists are cumulative — everything under "Shipped" is present in the current release branch.

Branch layout

Branch Purpose
ueVite26-JulyMajor-release Current major release. This is what you should build against.
ueVite26-JulyStaging Integration branch. Backports and features land here first.
ueVite26-JuneMajorRelease Previous major release, kept for projects mid-milestone.
Feature branches Work in progress on a single system, merged when stable.

Work-in-progress changes belong on a branch, not on release. See Commit and PR Conventions.

Shipped

Physics

  • Vite PhysX 3.4 as the shipping physics backend.
  • Library upgrade for compatibility with newer Clang versions and the latest Android NDK Clang, producing a meaningful performance increase — up to 2x in stress tests, typically around 1.4x faster in the Box Container Pile 10 test.
  • PhysX Blast working alongside Apex Destruction.
  • PhysX Fixed Timestep as an opt-in feature, fully guarded for zero overhead on the regular path.

Rendering

  • Callisto BRDF shading model: single- and dual-lobe GGX specular with specular Fresnel falloff.
  • Toon shading model, inspired by Guilty Gear.
  • HBAO+ ambient occlusion.
  • Compute-based SMAA.
  • Improved FXAA with a higher image quality option.
  • Updated TAA for better temporal resolve.
  • DLSS 4.5, FSR 2, FSR 4, XeSS, NIS and AMD Anti-Lag 2 ported and integrated.
  • Engine-side DLSS rendering support improvements.
  • Improved DDGI, including performance work on RT reflections.
  • SSAO fast path and a significantly cheaper SSAO.
  • TressFX hair integration.
  • Localized IBL.
  • Improved ACES colour reproduction.
  • Rendering optimisations across RHI, RT direct lighting, RT shadows, geometry collections, drawing, eye adaptation and shadow/light draw distance, plus AMD optimisations targeted at consoles.
  • Software occlusion, which was removed after 4.27 upstream.
  • Nintendo Switch specialised renderer base, which UE 5.0+ removed.

CPU and core

  • CPU optimisations for containers, friends usage, hash maps, NavMesh, volumetric clouds, the game thread, the task graph, SIMD, animation systems, texture handling, streaming and audio systems.
  • Optimised runtimes for skeletal meshes and actors.
  • Updated classes for easier backporting of UE5 codebases (game framework and containers).
  • Gameplay Ability System updates.
  • Oodle updates.
  • Modernised console systems.

Build, tooling and content

  • Full merge of UE 4.27 Plus, NvRTX 4.27, NvRTX 5.0, DLSS, TressFX, FSR and AMD patches.
  • Over 300 backports from UE 5.0 through the 5.8 era.
  • MSVC toolchain compliance up to 14.50 & SDK 10.0.26100 (Visual Studio 2026).
  • Shader compilation improvements.
  • Debloated runtime PSOs in Shipping configuration.
  • Editor loading improvements and editor quality-of-life backports.
  • Project default plugin debloat.
  • Batch tooling to produce installed engine builds and debloat the tree.
  • Bundled plugins: FSR, Motion Symphony, Houdini, ACL, Kawaii Physics, PhysX Instanced Subsystem, Splash Damage Ability System, ImGui and ImGui Tools, and others. See Bundled Plugins.
  • ImGui integration with benchmarking tools.
  • Large volume of toolchain updates, C++ modernisation, faster cooking, engine fixes, resolved memory leaks and stall fixes.
  • Mobile improvements and fixes.

In progress

  • Flat UI redesign, closer to UE5's visual language.
  • Integration of Multi-Threaded FLECS ECS library with Unreal Actors interaction.
  • Full C++20 support.
  • Further UE5 backport integration — roughly 1,000 backports pending promotion to release.
  • Rendering features: improved mesh handling, GI, shading models, ambient occlusion and specular aliasing handling.
  • Further ACES upgrades, colour space, HDR handling and tonemappers.
  • Large level optimisations.
  • Further shader compilation improvements.
  • CACAO ambient occlusion.
  • PhysX Flex and Flow: GPU-accelerated particles across vendors, with AMD compute and NVIDIA CUDA paths.
  • Tessellated water for ocean rendering, integrated into the RT scene for reflections.
  • Improved performance for RTAO and RT shadows.
  • Engine-level multi-threaded tick aggregation for improved instruction coherency.
  • Core C++ library upgrades and a core engine math upgrade.
  • Larger ray tracing rendering changes.

Planned

Tracking

Resource Link
Work plan Trello board
Backport tracker GitHub project
Sample projects ViteStudio-Tech

See also